As part of this year-long theme, AiG's dynamic speaker Carl Kerby has written this month's lead article. Carl has a tremendous burden in particular to "take young people back"-back from the world's teaching and to point them instead to God's Word and Christ.
- Ken Ham, AiG-USA president
As I speak across America, I hear it all the time: "Creation vs. evolution. Who cares?"
Today we are engaged in a war of worldviews. Secular humanism (with its evolutionary and millions-of-years foundation) is fighting tooth-and-nail against biblical Christianity (and the idea that God is the Creator) for the hearts and minds of our children. Over the past generations, we've seen the battle increase and intensify.
America was founded on Christian principles based on the Bible. In fact, just two generations ago, the majority of Americans supported prayer, Scripture readings and Bible instruction in public schools. They also supported displaying nativity scenes, crosses and the Ten Commandments in public places. "Gay" marriage and abortion were against the law.
Today, however, it is very obvious that the population as a whole does not see the Bible as the absolute authority it once did. Pollster George Barna found that in the USA "a minority of born again adults (44%) and an even smaller proportion of born again teenagers (9%) are certain of the existence of absolute moral truth."1
So what has happened? Why the dramatic change? Why is the moral position of previous generations being outlawed more and more? What has driven this moral collapse? Why is this war going on?
Whereas Christian thinking once permeated the public education system, today the Christian God, prayer, Bible study and biblical creation have all but been excluded from the system. Now, generations (including the majority of students from church homes) are being trained in a secular (anti-God) religion.2 They are being indoctrinated to believe that the universe-and all that exists within it-can be explained without God.
They are taught, with increasing intensity, a cosmology, geology, biology and anthropology that are all evolutionary. In essence, these students are being educated against the truth of the Bible's history in Genesis, and thus, against its message of salvation and absolute moral standards.
Cultural evolution
In addition, television shows, movies, comic books, ads and so on are laced with evolutionary thought, subtly (and not-so-subtly) reinforcing the idea that we are nothing but evolved pond scum, the result of billions of years of natural processes. Examples:
- highly evolved "X-Men"
- evolution/"millions of years" taught in the Jurassic Park films
- cover stories of Time, National Geographic and Newsweek, etc.
Our children are inundated with messages from the media which, by and large, have an evolutionary, anti-Christian foundation.
In the USA, we have approximately 400,000 churches and 6,000 first-run movie theaters. Which do you think affects our culture more? Unfortunately, the Hollywood writers and producers have more influence on our youth today than do our pastors and Sunday school teachers.3
Sadly, most Christian leaders in the church have given ammunition to the opposition by compromising with evolutionary ideas (either wittingly or unwittingly); they have added millions of years to the Bible, and many teach that evolution and Christianity are compatible. These leaders have, in effect, helped this takeover and fueled today's "culture war." What has resulted is that recent generations have begun to reject or reinterpret the Bible's history in Genesis, thus opening a door to undermine authority in general for the other 65 books of the Bible.
The more that generations are trained to disbelieve the Bible's account of origins, the more they will doubt the rest of the Bible, as all biblical doctrines (including marriage) are founded (directly or indirectly) in the history in Genesis 1-11. We see the direct result of this doubt and compromise reflected in the increasing number of moral battles concerning "gay" marriage, abortion, and so on.
Secularism, with its moral relativism, is in direct opposition to Christianity and its absolute morality. The battle is between these two worldviews: one that stands on God's Word and one which accepts man's opinions.
What will be the outcome? Can America return to a Christian worldview that will once again permeate the culture?
Yes, it can, but only if there is a return to the authority of the Word of God … beginning in Genesis. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2002/12/14/creation-public-schools
References and notes
- Barna Research Online, "The year's most intriguing findings," from Barna Research Studies, December 12, 2000.
- There is no such thing as neutrality. As the Bible states in Matthew 12:30: "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad."
- It is estimated by the Barna Institute that in this generation, two-thirds of the children from evangelical homes will leave the church after they leave home. For more information, see State of the Church: 2002 by George Barna.